REFLECTOR: N4PE flies but not so good at the end

[SlvEgl99 at aol.com]

Terrible news!! I do remember the feeling I had with Bob I, my XL went down  
at the factory on the first flight. Like yours, no serious injuries, but the  
feeling in the pit of my stomach took two weeks to go away. And I had been  
building only about a year at the factory.
 
Sorry to hear it!! Hope you can recover it and rebuild it.
 
Bob Wood
 
 
In a message dated 3/29/2009 9:49:46 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
michalk at awpi.com writes:

Group,

Today was my first day to fly.  Unfortunately it  resulted in an off
airfield landing.  It's been a long day, and I  wanted to get this out
there before the FAA notice was posted.

I  have several theories at this point as to what happened, and I'll  go
through each one trying to identify the smoking gun.

First, the  flight.  Approximately 12:30 pm with a 5 knot southern wind,
I  prepared for takeoff.  Some people think I am a bit cautious,  and
maybe so in many cases, but today was a good day to be cautious.   I had
the local fire department notified, and they were standing by.   Pretty
nice folks, and I think they liked having something interesting to  do.
Dean Norris with a sharp eyed passenger took off in his Velocity to  fly
chase.  I had maps made, and distributed to everyone with big  letters to
help direct ground crews in a bad event.  Dean took off,  and I waited
for him to get on downwind before starting my roll.   Previous to today,
I had been doing a bit of fast taxiing, and nothing  abnormal ever showed
up.  I rotated several times during fast taxi  tests at about 65mph.
Today, as I accelerated through 70, I remember  thinking how odd it was
that I had not yet rotated, but this was the first  time under power.
Rotation speed is lower without the power vector pushing  the nose down.

I accelerated, and lifted off about 75kts.  The  plan was to climb to
1000'AGL at 90kts.  I reached my 90kts very  quickly, and kept pulling
nose up a little bit more.  Man, there was a  lot of power.  The plane
flew straight.  No major stick forces  that I can recall.  I reached
about 900 feet, and the engine began  losing power.  I immediately turned
crosswind to downwind.  I  wish I could say I was maintaining optimal
airspeed, but I don't recall any  airspeeds after that point, and looking
back would have been the absolute  best thing to maintain.  I pulled out
some throttle, and regained some  engine power, but not enough to arrest
the descent.  I was still on  downwind, and picked out a field north of
the field to put down in.   Then I changed my mind.  With the bit of
power I had, I decided to  turn south into the find to reduce my ground
speed.  I picked out a  field, and turned to it.  I ended up about 600
yards north from the  end of the runway facing south.

I will remember this day forever, and  will play back the choices into
eternity.

The plane contacted  ground, and came to a stop within 47 yards.  I
stepped it off.   The ground was quite soft.  The gear all had been
sheared off.   The right tip of the canard dug into the ground, and when
it did, caused  compression crumpling on the right side of the fuselage.
Next, the plane  wanted to move left, and that's when the main gear
really dug in and  sheared off, which was quite a jolt.

Nothing broken for me except my  ego.  I literally have a minor scratch
on my left hand, that's  all.  Amazing.  I'm not even sore ... yet.

Going back to the  causes, I have a few theories that need to be
researched.  As I taxied  over to the fuel pumps, I saw the low fuel
light was on.  After taking  on five gallons each side, I noticed the
warning light had turned  off.  When the engine lost power after takeoff,
the light was  on.  However, I'm not sure fuel starvation is the reason
for the power  failure.  There's 4.9 gallons in that sump.  That's a lot
of  time, and there is no way I could have emptied it.  The other  theory
is that I was running too rich.  The electronic injection  system was
tuned out to 2250 RPM's, because that's the limit I could do in  ground
testing.  I then extrapolated out to 3000 RPM's (red line at  2800), and
then richened up the whole table to be on the safe side.   One thing I
wish I had done during high power testing was to see how much  more rich
I could go before killing the engine.  I pulled the spark  plugs, and the
plugs closest to the firewall were very sooty.  The  other four plugs
looked very good.

After 12 years of building, it  looks like I have a little bit more to
go.  The belly of the plane  looks good.  The compression buckling
worries me as to how I will fix  that.  The wings are also showing
compression buckling just outboard  of the spar attach  bolts.


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